CollabNet on Monday will offer application lifecycle management capabilities in its hosted service for distributed development.

CollabNet Enterprise Edition is a Web-based platform that acts as a global source code repository. A new upgrade, version 4.0, features CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager (ALM) . Customizable lifecycle functions are being added for requirements definition, design, code and build, testing, deployment and support.

"What Collabet ALM is, is it sits on top of this platform and organizes these distributed teams," for application lifecycle management purposes, said Bill Portelli, president and CEO of CollabNet. Project teams and partners around the world can be organized via the Internet.

A modifiable process template is provided for organizing development, to support methodologies such as waterfall or agile programming, Java or SOA.

"The first thing to say [about version 4.0] is that this is a significant enhancement to what they"re doing. They"ve got a very interesting vision," said analyst Robin Bloor, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates.

CollabNet is assembling a platform that provides massive scalability by integrating parts of the application development lifecycle, Bloor said. "What they"ve done is they"ve created a platform that really is highly distributed," he said. CollabNet, however, needs to develop more interfaces to third-party products, said Bloor.

For its part, version 4.0 does offer CollabNet Connectors, which allow for interfacing with third-party tools such as Mercury TestDirector or the Eclipse and NetBeans open source tools platforms.

CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 costs US$175 per month per developer.